Making history

Pluto and Charon

Happy Bastille Day!

This is a blog about ancient history, but it is important to remember that we live in an era where history is being made on a colossal scale on a daily basis. Today, humanity will, for the first time, have a spacecraft arrive at a dwarf planet nine billion miles away. Despite the fact that the spacecraft was the fastest object ever to be launched it has taken nine years to traverse the oceans of space and reach its goal. It is the first trans-Neptunian object to be visited by a spacecraft and the information that it will give us about the Solar System will advance the cause of science.

In other news (yesterday), a new particle was possibly confirmed in the Large Hadron Collider. A possible penta-quark was observed and while the results are still to be reviewed, if this was to be deemed viable it would show a huge leap for science, from the very large to the very small.

History is a continuous process and we live in an exciting epoch.